1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to connector panels for coupling incoming paired telephone wires to wires running to various locations in a house or other type of building.
2. Related Art
In order to comply with a new telephone industry standard called Category 5, residential homes must be wired with four paired telephone lines coming into the residence. Category 5 also requires a separate dedicated pair of wires for every telephone jack in a house.
Under previous standards, telephone jacks could be looped in series requiring significantly fewer wires at the telephone wire distribution panel or center, which is typically located in the basement of a house. A block of paired series connectors has often been used to connect an incoming paired telephone line to several telephone jacks in various locations throughout a house. A significant shortcoming of this approach is that telephone wires leading to different rooms in a house often remain unlabeled and generally disorganized, causing unnecessary time and effort to be expended whenever the paired telephone wire leading to a particular telephone jack in a particular location of a house needs to be identified, disconnected from an input line, and/connected to a second input line instead. In order to change a telephone jack from one input line to another, after identifying the line or lines leading to the telephone jack of interest, the wires will typically need to be un-bundled so that the output wire can be connected to an input wire located elsewhere in the block of connectors.
In light of the requirements of Category 5, namely, four input lines and a “home run,” in other words, a separate dedicated paired wire, for each wired telephone jack, wiring a home according to Category 5's requirements presents an organizational challenge not previously addressed by prior art telephone wire distribution center. Accordingly, there is a need for a paired telephone wire distribution center for organizing input and output telephone wire pairs and labeling the location or room in a house to which an output paired telephone wire is run. Such a distribution center should facilitate organizing, labeling, identification, and the ability to readily switch a particular output wire pair from a particular input pair to any of the other input wire pairs. An additional practical consideration is that such a distribution center should be inexpensive to manufacture because the individuals who run telephone wire in homes typically are very cost conscious.